Genuine Community Field Guide

The Field Guide to Genuine Community

is a tool to help groups move from facade to family by answering questions like

• Who is my spiritual family?
• What does a spiritual family do?
• When and where does a spiritual family interact?
• And why should I care? 

The guide covers five weeks, including a daily reading four days of the week and a fifth day where your group would meet. Since we are suggesting an every other week rhythm, this would lengthen the journey out to ten weeks. We hope that this experience provides some valuable tools to help us become more intentional in the practices that allow for deeper connections centered on the unity that can only be found in Christ.

Why is this important?

This is important because we know that it is possible to be plugged in, have a community group, show up every Sunday, do all of the right things, and yet somehow feel as though you are not communing with anyone. To feel just as isolated as you did before you did all of those things.

Last semester we rolled out Saturate to help relaunch our community groups after the pandemic. The whole purpose of Saturate was connection. We wanted those who had been a part of us before the pandemic to get reconnected, and we wanted to offer those who were new the opportunity to connect for the first time. 

But if you remember from our communication to you, the goal is not to stay a community group. Being a community group is only the first of four stages. The next step in a group of believers’ progression is to become a small group. A part of what characterizes a group’s transition is that they begin to learn how to live out the rhythms they were introduced to in the community group phase, in everyday life. 

That is why this Spring, we want to lead our groups into using the Genuine Community Field Guide. 

How do you sign up?

Starting Sunday, November 21st, groups and individuals can begin signing up to receive their Field Guide for Genuine Community. We will keep sign-up open until December 19th. REGISTER HERE!

For those in groups, you will remain with your current group. We will match you with an existing group or form a new group for those not in groups. The cost of the book will be $10. We plan to have the book available for pick up the first week of January and for groups to kick off on January 16th. If you are being matched to a new group, you will find out the makeup of that group by January 9th.

For Saturate, a lot of the groups met every week. For the Genuine Community Field Guide, we suggest that groups adopt an every other week rhythm that allows them to use those additional weeks for celebration and service opportunities.